Thread by @WilliamYang120

By @LiYuan6: "After years of testing and hesitation, #Russia is heading toward harsher internet censorship akin to #China’s Great Firewall to better control its people. China’s information dark age could be Russia’s future." nytimes.com/2022/03/18/bus…

"Nearly all major Western websites are blocked in the country. A generation of Chinese have grown up in a very different information environment from the rest of the world. Mostly, they are left to believe in what Beijing tells them."

“When people ask me how info environment within the Great Firewall is like. I say, ‘Imagine the whole country is one giant QAnon," wrote @Yaqiu on Twitter.

“What is darkness?” asked a user on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. “You can’t speak the truth, and you aren’t allowed to see the truth.”

The two countries have the tendency to learn the worst from each other.

“Unlimited freedom can lead to terrorism,” China’s internet czar at the time, Lu Wei, told his Russian audience at a forum. “If borders exist, they exist in cyberspace, too,” said Fang Binxing, known as “father of the Great Firewall.”

"China has not always been as tightly controlled as it has become under its top leader, Xi Jinping. In the 1990s and 2000s, investigative journalists broke many stories that led to the downfalls of government officials and to judiciary reforms."

"The internet and social media made it possible for the public to exchange ideas, debate important topics and pressure the government to respond to their concerns."

"There was censorship — at times very strict — and some people went to jail for voicing their political views. But there was a little room for free speech, as there was in Russia for much of Mr. Putin’s rule."

"The effects are clearly demonstrated in the overwhelmingly pro-Russia, pro-war and pro-Putin online sentiment in China after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February."

"A huge number of Chinese internet users have bought into the disinformation that the Russian and Chinese propaganda machines feed them."

"It requires a lot of perseverance for someone with independent thoughts to keep a presence on Weibo. A law scholar I know had set up 343 Weibo accounts between 2009 and 2014, only to see them deleted one by one."

"Some of them survived only a few minutes. Many people quit social media because they couldn’t stand the abuses by government trolls and little pinks. They also don’t want to risk of getting jailed for a post."

"That kind of reporting is long gone. When news happens, the Chinese public has no choice but to accept the government’s version of truth."

"In January, when the government of the northwestern city of Xi’an imposed a strict lockdown that created chaos and crises not seen since Wuhan two years ago, few news outlets sent journalists to cover it."

"The only significant reporting the Chinese public got was a first-person blog post written by a former investigative journalist known by her pen name, Jiang Xue."

"A well-known Chinese intellectual has written three books that might never get published. Another famous scholar has written five books with no hope of getting them past the censors."

"I used to doubt that young people would want to watch jingoistic propaganda movies. My generation couldn’t run away from them fast enough, like Russians in the 1980s and 1990s. But I was wrong."

"Young censors are so ignorant about China’s forbidden history that they need to be taught before they start work. Otherwise, they won’t even know to look for references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests,...

... or to the dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Some young people believe it’s their responsibility to report to the authorities on speeches they deemed not in line with Communist Party values."

"For many Chinese online users, the Great Firewall is seen as necessary to ward off the information and ideological imposition from the West. And after the Kremlin followed suit this month, banning many foreign websites, many in China cheered the decision."